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[You, quoting Rush] "They think that the people at ABC compete with NBC and CBS to be first. No, folks. they're nothing more than Democrats with bylines. It's all they are. They're all in the same team: ABC, CBS, NBC, and I'll tell you what team they're really on, and that's the Ivy League graduate team......"

Actually, that isn't quite true. Jan Crawford is a Southern girl who graduated from the University of Alabama (journalism, apparently, because she immediately went to work, in 1987, for the Chicago Tribune) and then University of Chicago School of Law (one of the best in the country), getting her JD in 1993.

Yeah, Jan's a "member of the club" but there are multiple avenues of access -- which Paul Fussell outlined in his book of 20 years ago, Class.

In Class, Fussell treats education extensively, and why it is that William and Mary and Colby and the Ivies are on one side of the educational trash line, and most small state universities like Sul Ross and Lenoir Rhyne and Southern Illinois are on the other -- even the big state universities like Arkansas and Kansas. If Crawford had stopped her education at her first degree, from Alabama, we probably would never have heard about her, except as a byline in some old Trib stories.

Fussell charges that fraud and maleducation are rampant throughout U.S. colleges and universities, which have been compromised by the mis- and nonfeasance of NEA-led secondary-school teachers and Party Line-hewing administrators. As a result, most Americans are not sufficiently educated to think as autonomous human beings, as individuals, an educational condition which endangers the American form of government.

That, he says, is the trash line.

The problem with Fussell's class paradigm, which he says is the American paradigm which he does not advocate but merely describes (he says -- a member of the uppermost, most elite group to which Wm. F. Buckley and Gore Vidal belonged -- that he would wish for us a scrapping of "class" structures and an adoption instead of bohemian individualism), is that it does preclude a great deal of the upward mobility that once typified Jacksonian America and directly led to American success, and the current paradigm does foster the kind of credentialism and invidious groupthink that Rush is complaining about in this transcript.